


Lighting Candles

by ariadnes_string



Category: Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
Genre: Canon Jewish Character, F/F, Hanukkah, Jewish Holidays, Knitting, Stolen Kisses, minor infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 22:07:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21841795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: A desire for the familiar turns into something else.
Relationships: Miryem Mandelstam/The Staryk Lord, Miryem Mandelstam/Wanda Vitkus
Comments: 21
Kudos: 55
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Lighting Candles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hellseries](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellseries/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, hellseries! Since Yuletide actually falls during Hanukkah this year, this was particularly fun to write.

As all married couples do, my husband and I came to a compromise about visiting relatives. After some negotiation, he agreed to accompany me to my family’s house for the first night of Hanukkah, but for that night only. I will not tell you what I offered him in return. 

“Eight nights,” he said, as we prepared for the journey. He made a sound that conveyed both annoyance at such excess, and a grudging respect. 

It did not trouble me overmuch. In days before my marriage I would have agreed with him. I am pious, in my way, but so many evenings of play, and song, and food had left me impatient to concentrate again on business.

Now an evening at the farm where my family lived with Wanda and her brothers was something I anticipated happily. I always enjoyed the way the cold gripped me as we crossed the border outside their gate, and then loosened in the heat of the farmhouse stove. The peculiarly human sensation of pain dissolving into comfort was something I never felt in the Staryk lands, where the temperature did not change and I had ceased to notice its unchangingness. The pop-sizzle of oil for frying potato pancakes seemed enthralling music, luring me so close to the spitting pan that Wanda shooed me away.

“Careful,” she said, hardly turning her eyes from the food, “You’ll end up with grease on your beautiful dress.”

I moved away, unwilling to tell her I had a hundred gowns just as beautiful. It was human heat that was an irreplaceable treasure for me now.

My mother had taught Wanda to make latkes, and she had taught her well. These were crisp on the outside, tender within, and we ate them with sour cream made from the farm’s own cows, and apple sauce made from its own fruit trees. Even my husband seemed to relish them. The blessings said and the meal eaten, my father and Sergey played dreidel with Stepon on the floor in front of the stove. My husband took himself outside to walk the boundary of his lands. My mother, Wanda, and I cleared the table, and washed, dried and put away the dishes. Then my mother and Wanda took out their work and watched the game. It felt odd to be empty-handed, but needlework and knitting were yet another thing I had grown unused to in my new life—not that I had ever had much patience for them. Idle, I watched the women’s hands.

My mother was darning wool socks so large they could only be Sergey’s. Wanda, however, was knitting an intricate pattern into fine, pale wool. Her large hands were deft and capable on its strands. As she moved the stitches between three (or was it four?) needles, a kind of lace emerged, both delicate and sturdy. I remembered the lumpy knitted skirts Wanda had worn when she first came to us, and wondered at this new skill. 

Noticing the direction of my gaze, my mother said, “Wanda’s fingers are magic now, and we are all the warmer for it.” 

Modest, but still forthright, Wanda added, “It seems a kind of magic. But it is only the magic you taught me, Miryem, the magic of numbers and counting and finding patterns.” 

Her hands were less roughened by outdoor work these days, but I thought the thickening around the knuckles, the callus on the side of her thumb, would be with her for life. It touched me, all over again, the suffering she had undergone to come to this place, the strength she’d exerted to make it safe for her family, and my own. But all I said was, “It is beautiful, Wanda.” And she smiled a little, and perhaps reddened, though it was difficult to tell with only the light of the candles and the stove.

The room had grown warm with the heat of so many human bodies. I watched Wanda’s fingers pull and tug and weave the wool until I could almost feel the sureness of their touch on my own skin. It was a pattern, to be sure, but also a mystery; the strands of yarn merging into the growing shawl were a path I followed, lulled by their twining. 

A sharp draft of cold air woke me—my husband returning from his walk (or had it been a patrol?). The Hanukkah candles had burned down, and everyone was putting away their games and work. Wanda stretched the shawl between her hands, before folding it into her basket, as if to gauge its progress. She worried her fingers over an imaginary mistake, and I wished, too, to touch the wool, to test the strength of the pattern. But my husband reached out his hand to me, and with hugs and kisses to all, we bade farewell.

In the days that followed, we resumed our life in the glass mountain. There was still rebuilding work to be done, so I was not idle. Nevertheless, I found I could not settle. I missed my family, I told myself, as many newlyweds do. But it was not my mother I thought of, as I lay sleepless on my luxurious bed, but Wanda’s knitting. I could see the dip and pull of her fingers behind my eyelids, could almost hear the quiet click of the needles. My bed seemed cold, whether or not my husband lay beside me, and I imagined I would only be able to rest under something rougher and heavier than our silk coverlets. Perhaps it is magic, I thought, after the second or third night of such haunting; perhaps she casts a spell to call me home—although I knew in my heart there was no one less likely to use such subterfuge than Wanda. I am merely missing human warmth, I thought.

Still, on the morning after that second or third night, I flung myself from my bed with purpose. I shall go to them, I thought. My husband had only agreed to one night of celebration, but surely I can attend as many of the nights of Hanukkah as I wish, in the practice of my faith. I glanced in my tiny mirror and saw that it was dark in the land of men. I shall go for the candle lighting, I thought, and summoned Shofer. He looked somewhat uneasy at my request to leave the Staryk lands alone, but I reassured him that it was only for a family festival, and he need only wait there for a few hours, and then drive me back. “You are welcome to join us,” I offered, but he demurred.

And yet in my dream-muddled or half-bewitched state, I had made a grave mistake. When Shofer brought the sleigh to a stop just beyond the farmyard fence, the windows of the three-chimneyed house were not lit as I expected. Only a wisp of smoke escaped the central chimney; the rest of was dark. Fearing the worst, I sprang from the sleigh, ordering Shofer not to follow—I knew not what I’d find, and someone would need to return to tell my husband if the worst should happen. 

Only as I gingerly pushed open the front door did I realize my error. In my haste and confusion I had mistaken the deep dark of a winter morning for that of evening. The household slept. As I stepped across the threshold, I saw only Wanda, up early to make the family breakfast, bending over the stove. She was bundled in a woolen shawl and her yellow hair was not yet braided for the day. It fell across one shoulder, and the waning moonlight through the open door made it gleam like Staryk gold. I remembered how dull and lank Wanda’s hair had been when she first came to our family, and found it more beautiful now for the memory. 

Hearing the door open, Wanda turned quickly, the wooden spoon she had been using to stir porridge raised to ward off any threat. Seeing me, she lowered it. “Miryem?” she said, “Has something happened?” Like me, she feared the worst. We had been taught that by experience.

“No,” I answered. But then I stopped. I no longer had any idea why I’d come, or what I was doing there. 

She crossed the kitchen to close the door, then turned to me. Her arms spread wide as if to embrace me, but stopped before the impulse was completed. “You’re shivering,” she said, when we stood less than a hand’s breadth apart. She was right. I had not noticed in my fear and worry, but the chill of human winter had crept under my rich Staryk coat and danced along my ribs, despite the glowing stove. 

“Let me make you some tea,” Wanda said, “some food to warm you.”

I shook my head again. My throat seemed to have closed up. No food would be able to pass through it, nor could words escape it.

Only then did Wanda put her arms around me. I could feel their strength through her thick sweater and wrap. Such was the difference in our heights that the warmth of her cheek pressed against the top of my head and her unbound hair fell across my face. We had hardly touched when she worked for me, and the unexpectedness of this embrace, here in the silent kitchen, all the world asleep, seemed to rob Wanda too of speech. She merely rubbed her hand down my back, as if soothing a skittish horse, and murmured something that wasn’t words.

The scent of her—of wool, and baking, and, very faintly, of farmyard—seemed to me the essence of warmth. It made me greedy, made me want to burrow under those knitted garments to its source, the pale planes of her skin. Without meaning to, I nestled closer, searching for the hollow of her throat, although it was covered by her shawl. Had I already become so like my husband’s people, some part of me wondered, eager to steal human heat?

“Miryem?” Wanda had found her voice, but it was hoarse with more than the earliness of the hour, as if she too had been taken unaware by longing and greed. She loosened her arms and allowed again the hand’s breadth space between us. 

Perhaps my time among the Staryk had made me bold. Perhaps I had always been that way, and that was why I had found my place among them. Whatever the reason, it was at that moment that I lifted my head and caught her mouth in a wild kiss. 

I could feel Wanda’s surprise, but also her welcome. Her hands, which had been around my shoulders, came up to push back my hair and cradle my face. And here I found I was once again mistaken. I had thought it was a longing for familiarity that had drawn here, for the warmth of family and the tastes of home. But it was the strangeness of Wanda’s kiss that stoked my desire. Her mouth was wide where mine is small, her lips narrow where mine are full. And they held not the warmth I might have imagined, but an unsuspected fire. This was no magic, I realized, but something far more human and more powerful. 

I wish I could say that it was a perfect kiss, and that we stayed locked in its enjoyment until our families were woken from their sleep by my husband battering down the door. But that did not happen. I may be bold, and Wanda brave, and both of us perhaps too willing to court the unknown—but we are also loyal to our vows. Among the Staryk court, many will take lovers, and no harm is thought to be done to a marriage by those alliances. Yet that is not the way of my people. The thought of how my grandfather would judge this behavior inserted itself between us, and Wanda must have had a similar idea, because after a few bare moments of bliss we untangled ourselves from each other and straightened our clothes.

“Here,” she said, unwinding her shawl from her shoulders and settling it around mine. “This will keep you from the cold.”

And so when my parents and her brothers did emerge, rubbing morning sleep from their eyes, and almost simultaneously my husband burst through the door, having been driven there at breakneck speed by Shofer, still worried something was amiss at the farm, they merely found us sitting side by side near the stove, Wanda explaining her magic of counting stitches as I struggled to knit an uncrooked row. 

Agreements are made to be, if not broken, then at least renegotiated. And so it was that my husband and I spent the eighth night of Hanukkah with my family as well as the first. On that night, I was gifted a knitted coverlet, worked with an intricate pattern of leaves and branches. The finest wool of the human world is coarse compared with the cloth of the Staryk lands, and yet I keep the blanket always on my bed. Sometimes I run my fingers over the soft nubs and valleys of the stitches. And I remember.


End file.
